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Download Article (PDF) Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 356 2nd International Conference on Contemporary Education, Social Sciences and Ecological Studies (CESSES 2019) The Era of Crises: a Thematic Analysis of Ian McEwan's Saturday* Yuan Shen Yichao Song University of Jinan Shanghai International Studies University Jinan, China 250022 Shanghai, China 200083 Abstract—In Saturday, Ian McEwan draws a picture of the All these years of his writing career, McEwan has Western society, culture and individuals after the 9/11 attack. commanded great academic attention with many a scholar This essay analyzes the theme of Saturday in the perspective of doing research and writing essays on his novels. This makes crisis. The post-9/11 era describes the western society after no exception for China. In recent years, Chinese scholars terrorist attack, the ambivalence about the Iraq war, and the have laid their emphasis mainly on McEwan works, be they prevalent certainty, revealing McEwan's grand view of Atonement, The Child in Time, The Ploughman's Lunch, creation. Second, the post-industrial part dissects the The Cement Garden, or First Love, Last Rites. Yu Hua, one consumerism, the conflicts between culture and science, and of the most celebrated writers in China, once spoke highly of homogeneity, showing the novelist's unique thoughts on Ian McEwan, this is Ian McEwan, he who seems always to culture. At last, the analysis of individual crisis put under tiptoe around the boarders, the boarders between terror and microscope the distorted intersubjectivity, discipline and institutionalization and recovery. This essay shows McEwan's comfort, coldness and warmth, absurdity and authenticity, concerns and also hopes for mankind. The thematic analysis of violence and softness, reason and emotions, yet his writings Saturday in the perspective of crisis helps unveil the writer's weave them all together. Like a king commanding countless diverse visions and his understanding of a community of of territory, Ian McEwan's boarder narrative make him the shared future for mankind, and his thoughts on crises of king. When he depicts hope, disappointment rears its head, society, culture and individuals. as do terror and comfort, coldness and warmth, absurdity and authenticity, violence and softness, reason and emotions. Keywords—crises; Ian McEwan; Saturday A smattering of lights, however, has been shed on Saturday, which was written in 2004 when the Iraq war just I. INTRODUCTION broke out, and when the western world had yet emerged from the debris of the 9/11 attack. In such context did A. Literary Review Saturday come into being, but in some intriguing way, it was Born in 1948 in Britain, Ian McEwan is one of the most confined to one single day — 15 February, 2003, which was prestigious contemporary novelists who still arrests attention somehow rarely seen in other novels. Its protagonist, Henry worldwide. He is quite adept at depicting in grandeur Perowne, is a contented man — a successful neurosurgeon, protagonists' psychological activities, his words painting a sitting on the high rung of the social ladder. He is blessed vivid picture of romance and loathe, desire and hatred, war with a joyous domestic life, and happily married to a and peace, death and effervescence, empathy and antipathy. newspaper lawyer, Rosalind, enjoying good relations with McEwan is an outstanding novelist and a meticulous his children, Daisy, a perspective poet, and Theo, a rather storyteller, weaving together the nuts and bolts of his plots distinguished blues singer. with precise caution. Entering the 21st century, albeit prosperity and An enlightened luminary and liberal born in modern technological breakthroughs, the western countries, Britain, McEwan very often puts the deep-rooted malaises of especially democratic ones, like Britain and the U.S., has society and the weaknesses of human beings under encountered multiple "crises". The hierarchal gap continues microscope in his audacious novels, in which he also let bare widening; terrorism once again rears its ugly head, though the conflicts of modern England, if not of the Western world. Al-Qaeda was wiped out, the still more blistering and sinister Till now, he has already earned himself The Man Booker ISIS has been sickling innocent civilians all over the world. Prize and Somerset Maugham Award. In 2008, The Times The author can keep counting and never exhaust the list. In featured him on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers Saturday still exists a silver bullet to the crises the author since 1945" and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 mentioned above. Because after more than a decade, in its list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". Saturday still packs a punch in modern world. Though confined to one day, Saturday paints a vivid picture of the *Funds: This is a representative paper of "Shandong Higher Education lifestyle of modern Britain, the aftermath of 9/11, the Research Projects in Humanities and Social Sciences" (Project No. nervousness confronting the upcoming Iraq war, and most of J18RA247) and "Shandong Social Science Planning Fund Projects" (Project No.: 19DWWJ02). all, the "crises" haunting the western world. Thus, Saturday can be analyzed from the perspective of "crisis". Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). 648 Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 356 B. The Working Definition of Crisis dressing gown, without moving or making a sound, half About crisis there might emerge different explanations dreaming as he watched people die. and definitions. Merriam Webster defines it "an unstable or The traumas after terrorist attacks are felt throughout the crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is western world. All the morning after he saw the plane, impending, especially one with the distinct possibility of a Perowne was on edge and tried to find a thread in TV news. highly undesirable outcome or a situation that has reached a This trepidation is not only found in Perowne. For Theo, critical phase (Merriam Webster). A crisis is any event that is Perowne's son, 9/11 is also a watershed moment. This is the going (or is expected) to lead to an unstable and dangerous first time that Theo finds out that besides family and music, situation affecting an individual, group, community, or there is other thing that holds sway in his life. Now he once whole society. in a while leafs through the newspapers and politics also These definitions, however, are too broad to explain the emerges in the daily talks with his father. This dreadful crises discussed in Saturday. We still need a working mood permeates through the whole society. The 9/11 attack definition of "crisis". Ou Rong once wrote The Motif of has not only changed how people communicate with each Crisis in David Loge's Fiction, in which she wrote, "the 20th other, but also changed their way behaviors, transforming the century is an age crisis and the way Lodge dramatizes this individual concepts and social identities under the influence situation rounds off our survey of his four representative of public affairs (Ni, 2010: 68). works. As a man in in possession of muti-identities — a In the heels of the 9/11 attack, the democratic utopia led Catholic, a novelist, a critic, as well as a university professor, by the States collapsed. The Islamic utopia came into view. Lodge has been deeply concerned with various crises in After the cold war, democratic countries spearheaded by the modern Western society: crisis of religion, crisis of literature, U.S. have been promulgating the so-called soft power the crisis of literary criticism and crisis of higher education" (Ou world over. In the decades between the 1980s and 2000s, the Rong, 2007: 10). In the same way as Ou Rong wrote her number of liberal democracies (as defined by Freedom essay, the author also summed up three crises in Saturday: House) expanded from around 100 to close to 150. Never the crisis of the post 9/11 Era, the crisis of post-industrial before in the arc of human history had so many countries culture, and the crisis of the individual. Through the lens of given up so many political and economic buildings for one crisis, the author will spare no efforts to break apart Saturday, new mode. and find a way to deal with the crises in modern world. The U.S has always aspired to establish a world where democracy and freedom hold sway. The democratic utopia II. CRISIS OF THE POST-9/11 ERA under the disguise of freedom and democracy was almost completed. But the 9/11 attack signaled the bankruptcy of A. The Aftermath of Terrorism American's Holy Grail. The attack not just showcased the Till now, it has been 18 years since the two killing planes aversion and determination from Muslim world, but also have brought down the World Trade Center in New York. brought into our view a Muslim utopia dreamt by the All the past years, the whole world is sparing no efforts to jihadists. Both utopias, the Islamic or democratic, however, combat against terrorism and recovering from the trauma are actually dystopia. On the other hand, as to moral brought by 9/11. Writers all over the world have also tried to philosophy, they have the same disputes among them as we revive that tragedy in their books. After 9/11, some have here: they examine what are properly good both for the American and European writers have written many works body and the mind, good for human beings, and whether any themed on 9/11, like The Falling Man (2007) by Don Delillo outward thing can be called truly good, or if that term belong and Let the Great World Spin (2009) by Colum McCann only to the endowments of the soul.
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